Pre-Greek languages

[Larry Trask]

Given the amount of recent discussion of the Aegean problem on this list
recently, perhaps I might draw attention to a fairly recent article which has
been mentioned by no one and which may not be widely known.

The article is this:

	Colin Renfrew. 'Word of Minos: the Minoan contribution to Mycenaean
	Greek and the linguistic geography of the Bronze Age Aegean'.
	Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8(2): 239-264. 1998.

Renfrew begins in a familiar place:

Ancient Greek contains a sizeable number of words which cannot be native Greek
and which must have been taken from some other language.

The conventional position is that these words are pre-Greek, and that they
were taken into Greek from an earlier substrate language, already in Greece,
after the Greek-speakers entered Greece.

Renfrew queries this.  He notes that a number of these words appear to pertain
to a sophisticated urban civilization of a kind that is not known to have
existed anywhere in the Aegean before the second millennium BC.  He therefore
proposes the following scenario.

1. Crete had been inhabited since 7000 BC by the speakers of what eventually
became the Minoan language.  (No human settlement is attested in Crete before
7000 BC, and there is no evidence for a change in population before the second
millennium BC, when the Greek-speakers arrived.)

2. Minoan was neither Greek nor closely related to Greek.  It may or may not
have been an IE language, but Renfrew endorses the idea that Pre-Minoan was
introduced to Crete from Anatolia, and that it may well have been not only an
early IE language but even a member of the Anatolian branch.  (Recall that
Renfrew embraces a time-depth for PIE much earlier than most linguists do, and
that he places the IE homeland in Anatolia.)

3. Many of the problematic words in Greek (though not all of them) must have
been borrowed into Greek, *not* during the first Greek settlement of Greece,
but much later, during the Bronze Age, when the Greeks came into contact wih
the advanced Minoan civilization.  These words are thus not ancient substrate
words in Greek, but late adstrate (or even superstrate) borrowings.

4. There is consequently no early limit on the introduction of Greek into
Greece.  Renfrew leans toward the idea that there never was a "coming of the
Greeks".  Instead, he suggests, Greek itself evolved within Greece at a very
early period, out of a more-or-less vanilla variety of PIE which had already
occupied the territory.

Renfrew acknowledges some difficulties with this scenario, pointed out by John
Chadwick and others.  In particular, the problematic words which are names for
flora and fauna indigenous to Greece cannot readily be explained as late
borrowings from Minoan, and are more likely to be substrate words of some
kind.  But Renfrew does not see this as a serious obstacle to his scenario.

This position may provide some food for thought.  But let me stress that I
neither endorse nor oppose any of these suggestions: I am merely reporting
them.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk